Of course there are students like the above who defy the odds and each life is unique in its bundles of qualities, effort, talents and capabilities. We should celebrate students such as Mandisa Xaba from a poor township in rural KwaZulu-Natal who obtained seven distinctions in 2017 at her no-fees school, and has a place to study computer science at UCT (Nombembe et al., 2018). But as Lareau (2003) reminds us, we should not be blinded to the fact that membership in a social group matters in the creation of inequality and structures life opportunities. When we look across the life chances of low-income South African youth, we
HigHer education PatHways
are some way off the kind of multi-dimensional equitable access which does not allow circumstances to limit opportunities. Across all three dimensions there are amber warning lights indicating equity challenges, with each dimension having a knock-on effect for the others. There is no unambiguous green for go.
Access is constrained by the availability of sufficient places for qualifying Grade 12 students.
Accessibility is unequal across race, socio-economic class, rural/urban, quality of schools, field of study chosen and elite or non-elite university admissions criteria. Horizontality preserves stratification and status and is unequal across different types of universities and fields of study.
Thus, higher education enables mobility – for some – but also reproduces social privilege and intergenerational inequality across income groups. Different people have different resources which they can convert to the capabilities to access university; all do not compete fairly.
Achieving a place and being satisfied with that achievement choice are affected by multiple factors in each person’s life, including uneven capability sets shaped by resources, social conversion factors, preference formation and individual talents and qualities. Yet unequal endowments and resources make it urgent that university access is inclusive for those who qualify. In addition, access pathways which allow students entry with lower entry scores would enable a chance at higher education for students from low quality schools.
There is much we do not yet know enough about and more research on the access end is needed as noted earlier. We need action on multiple fronts – by universities, by government, by student movements and by individuals working in different and multiple ways to foster the formation of students’ capability sets and agency, using McCowan’s dimensions as a helpful equity grid. As Dreze and Sen (2002, p. 82) say, the basic approach to access ought to be ‘an overarching interest in the role of human beings – on their own and in cooperation with others – in running their own lives and expanding their freedoms’. In this way we might operationalise the capability to access higher education inclusively, thereby contributing to comparatively greater justice and more of the public good.
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